The MacBook Air is NOT designed to be a "primary computer."
In fact, the brilliance on Apple's part here is the recognition (FINALLY) that there are lots of people with big honkin desktop machines who also need a portable computer for going out to meetings, travel or just reading the web (on something bigger then a 3" screen) at the local coffee shop. For us, the Air is perfect - a minimalist extension of our main work computer.
The only two complaints I have about the Air are the hard drive (you get to choose slow or obscenely expensive) and the fact that Apple hasn't really taken the concept of a satellite laptop as far as they could in OS X. It would be cool if my MacPro and my laptop used WiFi to sync up documents, preferences, media files and such. This problem is especially acute in iTunes where I have hundreds of GB of media on my main machine, but have to manually manage those things on my laptop. I wish Apple recognized this problem and solved it elegantly.
Other then that, I already pre-ordered my MB Air with the SSD. I can't wait!
I think that a user wide field update is going to go smoother for the iPhone then any other PDA/Smartphone. The nature of the device - i.e. how deeply it is tied to iTunes - means that people are far more likely to synk with their main computer on a regular basis. iTunes is continually checking for updates and appears to download them automatically, even when the iPhone isn't connected. On the next sync, it makes sense that users would install the update (though it might just do that automatically, we don't really know yet).
Just an uninformed theory, but I think Apple would need to go 3G with the iPhone if they want to really succeed in the Euro market. Most Americans have never had the exposure to get addicted to a fast net connection on a cell phone, so going with EDGE is grumble-worthy but not a deal breaker for the US mass market. Europeans, on the other hand, are 3G fanatics from what I understand.
I spent the last year watching "TV" via iTunes season passes of shows I liked. Then I got a smokin' deal on a Sony LCD TV and got cable hooked up. My bill comes out to the same $85 a month as yours and I *vastly* prefer my Comcast service over watching TV via iTMS.
- I get much broader access to content. Yes, iTMS has a lot of shows I watch; but cable has all of those shows plus a whole slue more that iTMS doesn't offer and probably won't for a while (various Discovery shows, Good Eats, How Its Made, etc).
- OnDemand is pretty mindblowingly cool. The hour or so a day that I get to unwind in front of my TV, I can almost always find something good on OnDemand for free. If not, I can grab first run movies that I am to impatient to wait for via NetFlix.
- Even the shows I like are single use only (though, since i work at home, I like to throw The Office on in the background to remind me why I work at home). I guess really dedicated fans of a particular TV show might want to have constant access to those shows, but I don't really feel that way. In fact, the 80gb of iTMS video content I have is sort of a constant worry- I always fear that if I don't keep it backed up religiously, I am going to lose hundreds of dollars worth of content.
- People complain about Comcast, but they have been wonderful to me. The PVR functionality built into the cable box has a crappy interface compared to a TiVo, but it is perfectly serviceable and only $5 a month (and it records HD to boot!). Comcast screwed up my bill when I got everything hooked up and when I called them, they fixed it immediately and credited me 2 pay per view movies for my trouble. Their phone support is excellent and I couldn't be happier with them.
In short, the Apple TV doesn't really excite me. As exciting as it sounds like on paper, it is nothing more for a conduit to play iTMS content on your television. The problem is, I don't see the value in iTMS content so the Apple TV really doesn't do much for me.
Now, if it could play video off of YouTube or Google Video, or if it could shoot WMV or DIVX files to my TV.. I would be all over it in a heartbeat.
I've been carrying a PPC-6700 (with qwerty keyboard) for almost a year. From what I've seen, I can do everything the iPhone does. Granted, mine is thicker but still...
That is why Apple "gets it." Great products are not about a laundry list of features. They are about beauty, utility and just a smidge of what appears to be magic. Sure, there are phones with fatter feature lists, but they are clunky, inelegant and generally not something you get excited about using. This iPhone though? Who doesn't want to sit down for a few hours and just play with it? That pinch motion to zoom photos? That is going to sell at least 10,000 of these things alone.
I dunno. Maybe arrest him, bring him to the station, charge him with disorderly conduct, and tell him that if he causes trouble like that again, he's gonna spend a few days in jail? I know, it's a little bit "out there," but I really think this strategy could work.
That is precisely what the officers were trying to do, but the suspect refused to comply, resisted arrest, screamed explatives. This was after he was asked to leave by library staff, campus security (unarmed students) and finally by the University of California police.
It is not like 4 police officers showed up, demanded to see ID and when he didn't produce any, tased him. This incident took place ver a period of minutes and every point of escalation was controlled by the student who refused to comply. As a kicker, it looks like the student who got tased has been seeking to pick a fight with authorities (which one can already figure out by his screaming about the PATRIOT act).
I think an often overlooked factor in cases like this is the fact that the IT security community's tactic of publicizing security flaws in order to increase security is totally alien to most law enforcement agencies and the general public.
Most citizens and law enforcement officers probably operate under the assumption that agencies like the TSA are generally open to fixing flaws pointed out to them through private channels. We on/. are well aware of the fact that government agencies, like corporations, are generally slow in fixing security flaws unless publicly shamed in doing so. To the average man on the street though, publishing exploits, workarounds or tools designed to get around security features probably seems cavalier at best, if not downright criminal.
I think the security industry needs to come up with some way to educate the general public about the basic premise behind publicizing security exploits. With 30 seconds of education, I think most people would see why security researchers have to resort to using this tactic and would probably agree with it. In the absence of that sort of education however, folks like Soghoian will simply be branded somewhere between attention whoring annoyances and terrorist sympathizers.
Let me run Windows XP right next to OS X, at near native speed.
My main computer is a Mac Book Pro, but I need to keep a rapid Win XP box around because I need to run SolidWorks (ok.. and Half Life 2). I know a lot of people who are in a similar position due to some heavy lifting, Windows only app. Until Apple either does Boot Camp right (i.e. run XP alongside OS X) or Paralells fixes their big time speed problem, running XP on an Intel Mac is just a novelty.
"It is easier to ask for forgiveness then permission."
Before Google inked this deal with China, the company was not able to deliver any sort of reliable access to Chinese internet users. The country had 0 (Zero) Google Action.
Now, the country basically has 90% Google Action and the remaining 10% is just a flick of a switch away from getting turned on, a move Google could theoretically make at any time.
I don't see how providing 90% Google (with 100% Google not far behind) is bad when the alternative is 0% Google.
This "study" is big-time BS for the simple reason that the typical road-going driver has NEVER been able to pilot a vehicle safely through these sorts of dog-n-pony show tests which is why all of these technologies got invented in the first place.
Seriously, the people doing this study actually think that your typical driver facing a panic situation somehow had the foresight to remember some verbal instruction back from a high school driver's ed class about "Cadence Breaking" before ABS was a standard feature? Or that drivers from as little as 10 years ago had the sort of skid-pad training required to drill in the muscle memory and experience necessary to control a car in an understeer/overseer situation? No way; it was the inability for the typical driver to control a vehicle in these circumstances that led to hundreds of millions of dollars of automotive industry investment in these technologies.
I see what the study is getting at and it is a point that any rational person will agree with; drivers need better skill training. Telling people which way to move the wheel in a spin or how to massage the break pedal out of a textbook (or even on a video) is a useless substitute to making a student actually experience car control and build the muscle memory actually required to apply those skills in a high stress situation. At the same time, rational people also realize that nobody will ever invest the billions of dollars necessary in the sort of meaningful driver education on a skidpad and through static exercises.
Given our inability (through unwillingness of lack of funds) to train drivers, I believe that the technologies we've put on the typical passenger car are pretty amazing.
At the same time, the biggest contributing factor to accidents is simply the fact that people don't pay very much attention. Even with all of the idiot drivers on the road and the noted lack of car control skill, the overwhelming majority of accidents are totally avoidable. Unfortunatly, doing so requires the typical driver to have situational awareness above that of a rock...
I think one of the problems that Jobs has as an innovator is recognizing how his own innovations (or the ones he managed the creation of more accurately) actually change the market. What is considered simple and easy with computers today is far different then what was considered simple and easy 20 years ago because so many people utilize a computer every day, gain experience and their perceptions change.
When the iPod and the iTunes music store came out, it made the whole Mp3 revolution slick and accessible to people. Now that we have something like 4 years of iPods under our belt, people are more comfortable with the technology and so they are beginning to demand different features such as FM receivers or wireless earphones. The market has advanced and I think fundamental innovators like Steve have a difficult time recognizing smaller scale market changes. I think we see a lot of that in the design of OS X.
I do think the Video iPod will generally be a failure and I think Steve knows it too. Notice how the video iPod isn't a "special" model? It was simply a feature added to the higher end side of the iPod lineup, thus insulating the concept from risk. If the video iPods were separate products, it would be noted when/if they began to fail on the market and it would be trackable and perceivable. As it stands, the ability to play video is just a tacked on feature added to an already successful product; it can stay that way until video begins to gain market traction at which point, products tuned more towards video (bigger screens for example) can be produced. People are putting the video player cart in front of the content availability horse.
I grew up in Atherton California which is one of the towns in the area where Steve and Larry Ellison pal around. Apparently Steve's favorite sushi restaurant was this tiny place in Menlo Park (Toshi's... now called Koma) which I happened to go to one night for my birthday. Sure enough, parked just around the corner from the entrance were two silver Mercedes AMG S class sedans parked right smack in the fire lane and inside, Steve and Larry were having dinner.
It sort of pissed me off until I realized that, together, they oversee the employment of something like 40,000 people in the Valley. I guess a couple of perks are in order.
If you automate the supply convoys, none of your supplies will ever be delivered because every one of those convoys will be destroyed. Why? because the enemy has no incentive to NOT attack them. They can blow up driver-less robot trucks all day long and they know that nobody in the convoy is gonna do a damn thing about it.
Right now, there is an interesting phenomenon going on where you are statistically worse off in a uparmored HMMWV in Iraq then you are in one of the old thin skinned ones or even a Toyota 4-Runner. The insurgency is smart enough to know that if they hit the armored HMMWVs (driven by regular Army and NG units) that the convoy will simply power through the ambush, get out of dodge and never be seen again. They are easy targets because they don't put up a fight.
Marine and Army Special Forces unit doctrine has those guys driving a bit to get out of the deadliest part of the ambush, stopping, dismounting and bringing the fight to the enemy. While the insurgents are pretty good with the sneaky roadside bomb (IED) and suicide ca bomb (VBIED), they are cowards when put into a standup fight. Marines, SF and (when they engage) Army units kill all the insurgents when they dismount and bring the fight to the enemy and the insurgency knows this. End result? Insurgents don't attack as many Marine or Army Special Forces units even though their vehicles are not as buttoned up as the Big Army.
Automated convoys would be like a free buffet. Blow them up all you want; until you find a way to defend that convoy with some effective, automated technology, insurgents are going to attack them at will and you will never get any supplies. And no, you won't just be able to bolt on armor to solve the problem- in the race between better armor and bigger bombs, the bombs easily win.
Wannabe futurists (and some certified futurists) have been yacking about how the "PC is dead!" for the last 10 years, and they have been wrong. Will the PC become stripped down a bit in favor of more web based applications? Sure, but with memory and processing power so dirt cheep, the sheer economics of the PC architecture mean that there is no compelling reason to move applications or computational power off of the desktop/pocket and onto a server. The future model will probably be a hybred- you will buy a PC loaded up with feature rich applications that run client side, but those applications will be managed and automatically updated by a server.
Saying that the PC is dead in favor of a cell phone is patently absurd however. Cell phones offer such a highly limited user experience because of the screen size and input limitations. Yes, you can do some powerful things with a cell phone and you can receive real time updates on relatively thin slices of very specific information (stocks, weather, sports scores, traffic) and you can have limited "txt bsd comms via SMS." You will never really be able to learn a huge amount about new subjects via your cell phone, you will never be able to create and publish significant content on a cell phone, you will never have a rich and immersive media experience on a cell phone.
Finally, there is the carrier politics. This probably effects the US more then the rest of the world, but the cell providers have been the biggest impediment to cell phone technology. They have dragged their feet on rolling out new, high speed networks. They have indicated a desire for megalomaniacal control of all the content that goes onto each phone. They lock users into their crappy services with contracts and vastly overpriced hardware (a Palm costs $200, but slap a cell phone module onto the back of the Palm and it is now a $600 device, how does that work?).
... what DOESN'T delay the shuttle?
And for those of you who keep fighting the privitization of space with such arguments as "Who would put up telescopes and run pure science research?" The answer to that is NASA- instead of inefficiently and ineffectively blowing billions of tax dollars keeping the wheeles of their wussified, red tape, burocracy running, they could just bid out the launch of their projects to the lowest bidder in the private sector.
Ohh.. and while I am venting.. what happened to NASA's hardcore pilots? The kind in the movie "The Right Stuff" and "From the Earth to the Moon?" The people they trot out now to fly the shuttle all look like Volvo drivers.
- It is substantially ugly. The basic shape is OK, but then it has the vented sides and all sorts of useless depressions, lines and curves. I would have expected Apple to demand some quality ID out of Moto (and we know Moto can do it, the RAZR and upcoming SLVR are very hot).
- The dynamics of the phone market suck for releasing new technology. Phone handsets are way overpriced for the consumer and rely on those pesky contracts. Sure the ROKR looks OK now, but how is it going to look a year from now when better stuff is available and your locked into that contract? To me, this is a major problem with the cell phone market- there are numerous technology improvements going on IRT data rates, camera quality, wireless features, design, etc... but the carrier contract lockin puts a significant strain in consumer's ability to acquire such technology at a reasonable price.
- The capacity on the ROKR sucks. 100 songs? That's less then 512mb. If your going to lock people into an MP3 playing cellphone for 2 years, give them some real capacity and/or an SD expansion slot. Hell, the slot doesn't even need to be readily accessible, throw it behind the battery (because I don't know if iTunes can manage an iPod device with removable storage) so people can upgrade as they see fit.
- It looks huge. I don't get it how they can make a tiny cellphone (again, the RAZR and it's upcoming SLVR brother) and a tiny MP3 player (the Nano and the Shuffle), but when you throw these devices together, you end up with a product that is bigger the the stand alone components tapped together even though the most space hogging portions are combined (buttons, enclosure).
Apple gets how to design a product and Motorola, while they have had some success, really needs to let Apple take the lead on ID/Product design. Moto should focus on the wireless tech, dealing with the FCC and cell carriers and manufacturing.
What benchmark do you suggest we use in order to form a basis for discussing how new technologies are to be regulated? Need I remind you that it was only when computing technology began to draw analogies to physical property (trash cans, file folders, airbrushes) that computing became a meaningful tool for the overwhelming majority of the population? Why should the formulation of laws around computing be exempt from 'physical world' laws and precedent?
Technology only gains real meaning in society only when it becomes attainable and attainability in computing comes from drawing comparisons between very abstract ideas to 'real world' analogies. With those connections comes legal subjigation and those who are well versed in technology cannot write the rules to arbitrarily control the legal ramiications therin simply because they know the lingo.
Now, I'm not a lawyer, but in my opinion, he didn't break any law at all. The huge number of beautiful, fenceless, privately owned front lawns around the world demonstrate that this is a common practice and that upon finding one and a suitable blanket, it's reasonable to assume you are allowed to use it to take a nap. If the owner of the lawn didn't want the lawn to be public, the burden is on him to secure it by installing a 'No Trespassing' sign.
Seriously, where in any case law does it state that the BASIC ASSUMPTION about any piece of private property is that the owner of said property defaults to allowing public access without explicit permission?
The fact that he was creepy is precisely what brought him to the attention of local law enforcement. Rights, precedent and slippery slopes aside if you act like a creep while you are in clear violation of a law, you are gonna get hooked up with a set of handcuffs pretty rapidly. The local beat cop who arrested this guy probably doesn't know his WEP from his WAP, and he doesn't need to- that is exactly why we have courts and lawyers. The cop's job is to find, stop, detain and document what he reasonably assumes to be illegal activity and I think what he came across in this situation is pretty open and shut.
I say he was stupid because acting a bit more openly would have, I am 99% sure, prevented the whole thing from happening. He could have politely engaged the homeowner in conversation. He could have fessed up to using the homeowner's network. He could have simply driven away without ever returning. In the end, he decided to continue to act like a fucking stalker sicko and, need I remind you, a good portion of this country is in the midst of a manhunt for a little boy who's family was killed, who was kidnapped and raped along with his sister and who was probably executed himself all by a creepy, stalking sex offender. Yea, I want the local police to be a little bit jumpy about people stalking my home from the street- the constitution is not a suicide pact.
It is about the fact that the guy was a fucking creep.
Seriously- if he REALLY thought what he was doing was OK, why did he act all cagy and close the laptop/drive away every time the homeowner saw him?
WiFi or not, this guy was acting strange in front of someone's home in such a way that I think it would probably freak most people out. The cops used the WiFi excuse just to bust the guy and I say jolly good show on them. I would feel very diferently if the guy simply said to the homeowner who he was and the fact that he was surfing on his net connection, but he didn't.
And with that, the Patriot Act II will pass with flying colors.
Sort of like globalization, the overwhelming majority of people who get their panties in a bunch about how evil the Patriot Act is really don't have a bloody clue about what the Patriot Act actually does. The 'Library Statute,' while hardly ever used, happens to be one of the most easily lambasted portions of the legislation because the academics and intellectuals on the left hold libraries to be sacred places of privacy.
The fact of the matter is, the Patriot act was hardly ever used to collect library records and the Patriot act supporters know it. Any prospective terrorist is far better served by looking up public records and using the internet. Seriously, if you are a well financed terrorist who poses an actual threat to this country, would you have EVER gone to the library?
By removing the Library bit from the Patriot act, Congress can look like they actually care while still allowing the meat of the Patriot act to be renewed, if not even adding a bit more to it.
Slashdot Mirror
The MacBook Air is NOT designed to be a "primary computer."
In fact, the brilliance on Apple's part here is the recognition (FINALLY) that there are lots of people with big honkin desktop machines who also need a portable computer for going out to meetings, travel or just reading the web (on something bigger then a 3" screen) at the local coffee shop. For us, the Air is perfect - a minimalist extension of our main work computer.
The only two complaints I have about the Air are the hard drive (you get to choose slow or obscenely expensive) and the fact that Apple hasn't really taken the concept of a satellite laptop as far as they could in OS X. It would be cool if my MacPro and my laptop used WiFi to sync up documents, preferences, media files and such. This problem is especially acute in iTunes where I have hundreds of GB of media on my main machine, but have to manually manage those things on my laptop. I wish Apple recognized this problem and solved it elegantly.
Other then that, I already pre-ordered my MB Air with the SSD. I can't wait!
Since when did breaking out of prison become some sort of indication that a person was innocent?
I think that a user wide field update is going to go smoother for the iPhone then any other PDA/Smartphone. The nature of the device - i.e. how deeply it is tied to iTunes - means that people are far more likely to synk with their main computer on a regular basis. iTunes is continually checking for updates and appears to download them automatically, even when the iPhone isn't connected. On the next sync, it makes sense that users would install the update (though it might just do that automatically, we don't really know yet).
Just an uninformed theory, but I think Apple would need to go 3G with the iPhone if they want to really succeed in the Euro market. Most Americans have never had the exposure to get addicted to a fast net connection on a cell phone, so going with EDGE is grumble-worthy but not a deal breaker for the US mass market. Europeans, on the other hand, are 3G fanatics from what I understand.
Well... I don't know about that.
I spent the last year watching "TV" via iTunes season passes of shows I liked. Then I got a smokin' deal on a Sony LCD TV and got cable hooked up. My bill comes out to the same $85 a month as yours and I *vastly* prefer my Comcast service over watching TV via iTMS.
- I get much broader access to content. Yes, iTMS has a lot of shows I watch; but cable has all of those shows plus a whole slue more that iTMS doesn't offer and probably won't for a while (various Discovery shows, Good Eats, How Its Made, etc).
- OnDemand is pretty mindblowingly cool. The hour or so a day that I get to unwind in front of my TV, I can almost always find something good on OnDemand for free. If not, I can grab first run movies that I am to impatient to wait for via NetFlix.
- Even the shows I like are single use only (though, since i work at home, I like to throw The Office on in the background to remind me why I work at home). I guess really dedicated fans of a particular TV show might want to have constant access to those shows, but I don't really feel that way. In fact, the 80gb of iTMS video content I have is sort of a constant worry- I always fear that if I don't keep it backed up religiously, I am going to lose hundreds of dollars worth of content.
- People complain about Comcast, but they have been wonderful to me. The PVR functionality built into the cable box has a crappy interface compared to a TiVo, but it is perfectly serviceable and only $5 a month (and it records HD to boot!). Comcast screwed up my bill when I got everything hooked up and when I called them, they fixed it immediately and credited me 2 pay per view movies for my trouble. Their phone support is excellent and I couldn't be happier with them.
In short, the Apple TV doesn't really excite me. As exciting as it sounds like on paper, it is nothing more for a conduit to play iTMS content on your television. The problem is, I don't see the value in iTMS content so the Apple TV really doesn't do much for me.
Now, if it could play video off of YouTube or Google Video, or if it could shoot WMV or DIVX files to my TV.. I would be all over it in a heartbeat.
I've been carrying a PPC-6700 (with qwerty keyboard) for almost a year. From what I've seen, I can do everything the iPhone does. Granted, mine is thicker but still...
That is why Apple "gets it." Great products are not about a laundry list of features. They are about beauty, utility and just a smidge of what appears to be magic. Sure, there are phones with fatter feature lists, but they are clunky, inelegant and generally not something you get excited about using. This iPhone though? Who doesn't want to sit down for a few hours and just play with it? That pinch motion to zoom photos? That is going to sell at least 10,000 of these things alone.
I dunno. Maybe arrest him, bring him to the station, charge him with disorderly conduct, and tell him that if he causes trouble like that again, he's gonna spend a few days in jail? I know, it's a little bit "out there," but I really think this strategy could work.
That is precisely what the officers were trying to do, but the suspect refused to comply, resisted arrest, screamed explatives. This was after he was asked to leave by library staff, campus security (unarmed students) and finally by the University of California police.
It is not like 4 police officers showed up, demanded to see ID and when he didn't produce any, tased him. This incident took place ver a period of minutes and every point of escalation was controlled by the student who refused to comply. As a kicker, it looks like the student who got tased has been seeking to pick a fight with authorities (which one can already figure out by his screaming about the PATRIOT act).
it is an escape system...
FOR A SPACE SHUTTLE
Compared to what the crew of the shuttle trains for, this escape system is like a trip to an amusement park...
I think an often overlooked factor in cases like this is the fact that the IT security community's tactic of publicizing security flaws in order to increase security is totally alien to most law enforcement agencies and the general public.
/. are well aware of the fact that government agencies, like corporations, are generally slow in fixing security flaws unless publicly shamed in doing so. To the average man on the street though, publishing exploits, workarounds or tools designed to get around security features probably seems cavalier at best, if not downright criminal.
Most citizens and law enforcement officers probably operate under the assumption that agencies like the TSA are generally open to fixing flaws pointed out to them through private channels. We on
I think the security industry needs to come up with some way to educate the general public about the basic premise behind publicizing security exploits. With 30 seconds of education, I think most people would see why security researchers have to resort to using this tactic and would probably agree with it. In the absence of that sort of education however, folks like Soghoian will simply be branded somewhere between attention whoring annoyances and terrorist sympathizers.
I carry a Jimi and people ask me about it all the time.
Out of Leopard...
Let me run Windows XP right next to OS X, at near native speed.
My main computer is a Mac Book Pro, but I need to keep a rapid Win XP box around because I need to run SolidWorks (ok.. and Half Life 2). I know a lot of people who are in a similar position due to some heavy lifting, Windows only app. Until Apple either does Boot Camp right (i.e. run XP alongside OS X) or Paralells fixes their big time speed problem, running XP on an Intel Mac is just a novelty.
"It is easier to ask for forgiveness then permission."
Before Google inked this deal with China, the company was not able to deliver any sort of reliable access to Chinese internet users. The country had 0 (Zero) Google Action.
Now, the country basically has 90% Google Action and the remaining 10% is just a flick of a switch away from getting turned on, a move Google could theoretically make at any time.
I don't see how providing 90% Google (with 100% Google not far behind) is bad when the alternative is 0% Google.
This "study" is big-time BS for the simple reason that the typical road-going driver has NEVER been able to pilot a vehicle safely through these sorts of dog-n-pony show tests which is why all of these technologies got invented in the first place.
Seriously, the people doing this study actually think that your typical driver facing a panic situation somehow had the foresight to remember some verbal instruction back from a high school driver's ed class about "Cadence Breaking" before ABS was a standard feature? Or that drivers from as little as 10 years ago had the sort of skid-pad training required to drill in the muscle memory and experience necessary to control a car in an understeer/overseer situation? No way; it was the inability for the typical driver to control a vehicle in these circumstances that led to hundreds of millions of dollars of automotive industry investment in these technologies.
I see what the study is getting at and it is a point that any rational person will agree with; drivers need better skill training. Telling people which way to move the wheel in a spin or how to massage the break pedal out of a textbook (or even on a video) is a useless substitute to making a student actually experience car control and build the muscle memory actually required to apply those skills in a high stress situation. At the same time, rational people also realize that nobody will ever invest the billions of dollars necessary in the sort of meaningful driver education on a skidpad and through static exercises.
Given our inability (through unwillingness of lack of funds) to train drivers, I believe that the technologies we've put on the typical passenger car are pretty amazing.
At the same time, the biggest contributing factor to accidents is simply the fact that people don't pay very much attention. Even with all of the idiot drivers on the road and the noted lack of car control skill, the overwhelming majority of accidents are totally avoidable. Unfortunatly, doing so requires the typical driver to have situational awareness above that of a rock...
I think one of the problems that Jobs has as an innovator is recognizing how his own innovations (or the ones he managed the creation of more accurately) actually change the market. What is considered simple and easy with computers today is far different then what was considered simple and easy 20 years ago because so many people utilize a computer every day, gain experience and their perceptions change.
When the iPod and the iTunes music store came out, it made the whole Mp3 revolution slick and accessible to people. Now that we have something like 4 years of iPods under our belt, people are more comfortable with the technology and so they are beginning to demand different features such as FM receivers or wireless earphones. The market has advanced and I think fundamental innovators like Steve have a difficult time recognizing smaller scale market changes. I think we see a lot of that in the design of OS X.
I do think the Video iPod will generally be a failure and I think Steve knows it too. Notice how the video iPod isn't a "special" model? It was simply a feature added to the higher end side of the iPod lineup, thus insulating the concept from risk. If the video iPods were separate products, it would be noted when/if they began to fail on the market and it would be trackable and perceivable. As it stands, the ability to play video is just a tacked on feature added to an already successful product; it can stay that way until video begins to gain market traction at which point, products tuned more towards video (bigger screens for example) can be produced. People are putting the video player cart in front of the content availability horse.
I grew up in Atherton California which is one of the towns in the area where Steve and Larry Ellison pal around. Apparently Steve's favorite sushi restaurant was this tiny place in Menlo Park (Toshi's... now called Koma) which I happened to go to one night for my birthday. Sure enough, parked just around the corner from the entrance were two silver Mercedes AMG S class sedans parked right smack in the fire lane and inside, Steve and Larry were having dinner.
It sort of pissed me off until I realized that, together, they oversee the employment of something like 40,000 people in the Valley. I guess a couple of perks are in order.
That won't work.
If you automate the supply convoys, none of your supplies will ever be delivered because every one of those convoys will be destroyed. Why? because the enemy has no incentive to NOT attack them. They can blow up driver-less robot trucks all day long and they know that nobody in the convoy is gonna do a damn thing about it.
Right now, there is an interesting phenomenon going on where you are statistically worse off in a uparmored HMMWV in Iraq then you are in one of the old thin skinned ones or even a Toyota 4-Runner. The insurgency is smart enough to know that if they hit the armored HMMWVs (driven by regular Army and NG units) that the convoy will simply power through the ambush, get out of dodge and never be seen again. They are easy targets because they don't put up a fight.
Marine and Army Special Forces unit doctrine has those guys driving a bit to get out of the deadliest part of the ambush, stopping, dismounting and bringing the fight to the enemy. While the insurgents are pretty good with the sneaky roadside bomb (IED) and suicide ca bomb (VBIED), they are cowards when put into a standup fight. Marines, SF and (when they engage) Army units kill all the insurgents when they dismount and bring the fight to the enemy and the insurgency knows this. End result? Insurgents don't attack as many Marine or Army Special Forces units even though their vehicles are not as buttoned up as the Big Army.
Automated convoys would be like a free buffet. Blow them up all you want; until you find a way to defend that convoy with some effective, automated technology, insurgents are going to attack them at will and you will never get any supplies. And no, you won't just be able to bolt on armor to solve the problem- in the race between better armor and bigger bombs, the bombs easily win.
Wannabe futurists (and some certified futurists) have been yacking about how the "PC is dead!" for the last 10 years, and they have been wrong. Will the PC become stripped down a bit in favor of more web based applications? Sure, but with memory and processing power so dirt cheep, the sheer economics of the PC architecture mean that there is no compelling reason to move applications or computational power off of the desktop/pocket and onto a server. The future model will probably be a hybred- you will buy a PC loaded up with feature rich applications that run client side, but those applications will be managed and automatically updated by a server.
Saying that the PC is dead in favor of a cell phone is patently absurd however. Cell phones offer such a highly limited user experience because of the screen size and input limitations. Yes, you can do some powerful things with a cell phone and you can receive real time updates on relatively thin slices of very specific information (stocks, weather, sports scores, traffic) and you can have limited "txt bsd comms via SMS." You will never really be able to learn a huge amount about new subjects via your cell phone, you will never be able to create and publish significant content on a cell phone, you will never have a rich and immersive media experience on a cell phone.
Finally, there is the carrier politics. This probably effects the US more then the rest of the world, but the cell providers have been the biggest impediment to cell phone technology. They have dragged their feet on rolling out new, high speed networks. They have indicated a desire for megalomaniacal control of all the content that goes onto each phone. They lock users into their crappy services with contracts and vastly overpriced hardware (a Palm costs $200, but slap a cell phone module onto the back of the Palm and it is now a $600 device, how does that work?).
... what DOESN'T delay the shuttle? And for those of you who keep fighting the privitization of space with such arguments as "Who would put up telescopes and run pure science research?" The answer to that is NASA- instead of inefficiently and ineffectively blowing billions of tax dollars keeping the wheeles of their wussified, red tape, burocracy running, they could just bid out the launch of their projects to the lowest bidder in the private sector. Ohh.. and while I am venting.. what happened to NASA's hardcore pilots? The kind in the movie "The Right Stuff" and "From the Earth to the Moon?" The people they trot out now to fly the shuttle all look like Volvo drivers.
I am totally disappointed with the Moto phone.
- It is substantially ugly. The basic shape is OK, but then it has the vented sides and all sorts of useless depressions, lines and curves. I would have expected Apple to demand some quality ID out of Moto (and we know Moto can do it, the RAZR and upcoming SLVR are very hot).
- The dynamics of the phone market suck for releasing new technology. Phone handsets are way overpriced for the consumer and rely on those pesky contracts. Sure the ROKR looks OK now, but how is it going to look a year from now when better stuff is available and your locked into that contract? To me, this is a major problem with the cell phone market- there are numerous technology improvements going on IRT data rates, camera quality, wireless features, design, etc... but the carrier contract lockin puts a significant strain in consumer's ability to acquire such technology at a reasonable price.
- The capacity on the ROKR sucks. 100 songs? That's less then 512mb. If your going to lock people into an MP3 playing cellphone for 2 years, give them some real capacity and/or an SD expansion slot. Hell, the slot doesn't even need to be readily accessible, throw it behind the battery (because I don't know if iTunes can manage an iPod device with removable storage) so people can upgrade as they see fit.
- It looks huge. I don't get it how they can make a tiny cellphone (again, the RAZR and it's upcoming SLVR brother) and a tiny MP3 player (the Nano and the Shuffle), but when you throw these devices together, you end up with a product that is bigger the the stand alone components tapped together even though the most space hogging portions are combined (buttons, enclosure).
Apple gets how to design a product and Motorola, while they have had some success, really needs to let Apple take the lead on ID/Product design. Moto should focus on the wireless tech, dealing with the FCC and cell carriers and manufacturing.
It's called a television.
What benchmark do you suggest we use in order to form a basis for discussing how new technologies are to be regulated? Need I remind you that it was only when computing technology began to draw analogies to physical property (trash cans, file folders, airbrushes) that computing became a meaningful tool for the overwhelming majority of the population? Why should the formulation of laws around computing be exempt from 'physical world' laws and precedent?
Technology only gains real meaning in society only when it becomes attainable and attainability in computing comes from drawing comparisons between very abstract ideas to 'real world' analogies. With those connections comes legal subjigation and those who are well versed in technology cannot write the rules to arbitrarily control the legal ramiications therin simply because they know the lingo.
Now, I'm not a lawyer, but in my opinion, he didn't break any law at all. The huge number of beautiful, fenceless, privately owned front lawns around the world demonstrate that this is a common practice and that upon finding one and a suitable blanket, it's reasonable to assume you are allowed to use it to take a nap. If the owner of the lawn didn't want the lawn to be public, the burden is on him to secure it by installing a 'No Trespassing' sign.
Seriously, where in any case law does it state that the BASIC ASSUMPTION about any piece of private property is that the owner of said property defaults to allowing public access without explicit permission?
The guy got arrested for being stupid.
The fact that he was creepy is precisely what brought him to the attention of local law enforcement. Rights, precedent and slippery slopes aside if you act like a creep while you are in clear violation of a law, you are gonna get hooked up with a set of handcuffs pretty rapidly. The local beat cop who arrested this guy probably doesn't know his WEP from his WAP, and he doesn't need to- that is exactly why we have courts and lawyers. The cop's job is to find, stop, detain and document what he reasonably assumes to be illegal activity and I think what he came across in this situation is pretty open and shut.
I say he was stupid because acting a bit more openly would have, I am 99% sure, prevented the whole thing from happening. He could have politely engaged the homeowner in conversation. He could have fessed up to using the homeowner's network. He could have simply driven away without ever returning. In the end, he decided to continue to act like a fucking stalker sicko and, need I remind you, a good portion of this country is in the midst of a manhunt for a little boy who's family was killed, who was kidnapped and raped along with his sister and who was probably executed himself all by a creepy, stalking sex offender. Yea, I want the local police to be a little bit jumpy about people stalking my home from the street- the constitution is not a suicide pact.
It is about the fact that the guy was a fucking creep.
Seriously- if he REALLY thought what he was doing was OK, why did he act all cagy and close the laptop/drive away every time the homeowner saw him?
WiFi or not, this guy was acting strange in front of someone's home in such a way that I think it would probably freak most people out. The cops used the WiFi excuse just to bust the guy and I say jolly good show on them. I would feel very diferently if the guy simply said to the homeowner who he was and the fact that he was surfing on his net connection, but he didn't.
And with that, the Patriot Act II will pass with flying colors.
Sort of like globalization, the overwhelming majority of people who get their panties in a bunch about how evil the Patriot Act is really don't have a bloody clue about what the Patriot Act actually does. The 'Library Statute,' while hardly ever used, happens to be one of the most easily lambasted portions of the legislation because the academics and intellectuals on the left hold libraries to be sacred places of privacy.
The fact of the matter is, the Patriot act was hardly ever used to collect library records and the Patriot act supporters know it. Any prospective terrorist is far better served by looking up public records and using the internet. Seriously, if you are a well financed terrorist who poses an actual threat to this country, would you have EVER gone to the library?
By removing the Library bit from the Patriot act, Congress can look like they actually care while still allowing the meat of the Patriot act to be renewed, if not even adding a bit more to it.